Web 2.0

The place where I live, the San Francisco Bay Area, witnesses constant hype about technology. It also witnesses cyclical economic up and downturn like any other place on earth. By most account, right now we are going through an economic upturn here in the Silicon Valley. It's getting easier for the startups to get funding, mature startups are getting unsolicited funding proposals - even startups without any revenue or even without any solid business plan towards revenue are getting huge chunk of money to 'acquire customer'. Job market is hot. Good engineers on the lookout frequently end up with 3 or more viable job offers. Engineers who are not up for grab are getting unsolicited calls or emails from recruiters. It's 1999 all over again. The only difference is that the stock market is not yet showing "irrational exuberance" as Alan Greenspan had said.

Take the case of Web 2.0 (pronounce as web two dot o). There is a conference going on right now in San Francisco on Web 2.0. The first day was sold out with registration fees running into thousands. That shows there is a lot of interest and enthusiasm about Web 2.0. The tech blogs are constantly chattering about web 2.0. Tech columnists are dropping that term generously. Every other site is claiming that it is 'Web 2.0 enabled'. Now you go and ask 5 people what Web 2.0 actually is. You will get 5 different answer with couple more extra as bonuses. And chances are that all of them starts with, "To me web 2.0 is ...". That proves beyond any doubt that there is no definition, no coherent semantic explanation of the term, yet everybody is extremely excited about it. What else could be a better definition of hype!

First there was this Natural language search engine, then there were semantic web, then Internet 2.0 (which, by the way, is still alive but may not be kicking hard). There were SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), Middleware, thin client ... welcome to the hype-land.